I loved this book and highly recommend it to beginners and experts alike. I read it over a year ago and felt compelled to write this out of gratitude. The first section on the heart sutra (prajnaparamitra) was the clearest I have ever read (or heard) on the subject. The second section on Madhyamika I didn't spend much time on - lazy student that I am I find Tibetan logic tedious, despite its thoroughness & accuracy. The third section on Mahamudra was exceptional for the technical lucidity and clear practical guidance of an accomplished master. It was an inspiration to practice.

This small book (143 pages) provides some of the clearest and most helpful presentations of emptiness that can be found in English translation, both in terms of theory and practice. Part One contains the text of the classic Heart Sutra with an excellent commentary by Geshe Rabten. Part Two contains a translation of "A Guide to the Middle Way," which is a 6th century commentary by Chandrakirti to Nagarjuna's famous "Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way," a key text in the development of Mahayana Buddhist thought. Part Three contains Geshe Rabten's teachings on the "Root Text for the Gelugpa Oral Tradition of Mahamudra," by the first Panchen Lama, Lobsang Chokyi Gyaltsen. This is the main text upon which the Gelugpa tradition of Mahamudra is based, and it provides clear and practical instructions for developing calm abiding meditation by taking the mind itself as the object, and then gaining a direct experiential realization of emptiness.

"Managing For Excellence" is a portable well-illustrated handbook, which harbours all the essential tips for improving (individual) performance. The book is very straightforward. It is comprehensive, and highlights all the important factors that strengthen and weakens partnerships.
This is one book which helps its user to better understand strategies and improve output. It is superbly organized, and presents its techniques in a practical format.
However, anyone who already has the "Successful Manager's Handbook" need not spend on this one. Both books contain similar information.

Writing a book on the .NETcf is a challenge because there is a wide target audience to pick from...Each group has different needs e.g. introduction to programming for small devices OR to programming against the .NET libraries OR to differences with the desktop version etc. So, inevitably you will belong in one or more of the above categories with corresponding requirements and hence will find redundant info in a book that tries to please all people - such as this book.

You will find introductions to the classes of the .NET framework that exist on both desktop and CF. These are very good descriptions and even though there are deeper explanations in other books, here you have the confidence that everything described is applicable without having to check elsewhere for supported classes/methods. If you are very familiar with the desktop version you will be able to skim through a good half of the material in the book just noting the differences.

There are areas which are new to the CF or just very different from the desktop and these are covered well, including deployment, infrared comms and SqlServerCe. The winform controls have fewer methods than their desktop counterparts and as such you will have to create custom controls fairly often so the chapter on this subject is very valuable and well written. You will also have to interoperate with native code and the chapter on that is good including an excellent description of the CF-specific MessageWindow component.

Two areas are briefly touched upon and deserve much more attention: Targeting both the desktop and compact frameworks from the same projects and COM interoperability. I would have also liked a chapter on performance considerations since, naturally, speed and memory are of particular interest to anybody developing on small devices; a search on the cf newsgroup emphasizes this point.

The book ends with a useful appendix listing the framework namespaces and classes with a short description accompanying the ones that are supported on the CF. I am not including a list of the contents here but it is worth going through them to get a fuller picture. They are very accurate as you'd expect from a book that is well written with few if any grammatical/syntactical mistakes (although a couple of harmless factual errors crept in).

The .NETcf is in RTM and available through VS 2003 (public release expected end of April 03). It is no surprise that this is the only book on it available now which is why I could have given it 5 stars... However there are no groundbreaking ideas in the book and most info is available on the web...

I am half way through this book and I liked it. The authors are definitely doers and you can see it from the tips they provided. The samples are very extensive.

It's the book for Compact framework programming.

Don't forget to get the AskDotNet sample from GotDotNet.com, very good project too.

Jan Yeh

This book is good for .NET developers who want to port their application to .NET Compact Framework, and also must-have for eMbedded Visual Tools developers who want to migrate from eVB, eVC, VBCE, VCCE. Although this book is full of C# codes, there are samples for VB.NET as well.

There are many important topics included in this book, such as Data Accessing(ADO.Net & SQLCE), XML & XML Web Services, Multi-threading, Interoperating with Native Code, Custom Controls for .NET Compact Framework, and more than that.

If you want to learn more about .NET Compact Framework programming, or you are familiar with eMbedded Visual Tools, this could be your text book or survival guide.

After surveying books talk about .NET Compact Framework, this is what I can say, "NEVER MISS THIS"!

I've read two or three books about catching trout in Wisconsin, and this book is the most informative. There are detailed illustrations, including a hatch chart with all of the best bug hatches in the state. They also have detailed descriptions of some of the finest trout waters in Wisconsin. Good for the beginning angler as well, because the book gives good tips on starting gear and techniques. I found it extremely helpful. If you're planning on trout fishing in Wisconsin this book is a must.

Many fish-and-tell books suffer from either not enough information (the trailhead is where?) or too much detail, and sometimes an annoying combination of both. The reader is left wondering about the bigger picture and the finer points of the resource and local opportunities to experience it.

Not so with this book. It is painstakingly researched and very well presented. The resource and conservation overview is integrated with specific and useful information on streams, hatches, and techniques. The book is well-written and generally enjoyable to read, as well as being a good reference for beginners to advanced flyfishers. It is clear that the authors know their home waters and have great love for them. I highly recommend this book to those wanting to know more about the excellent fly fishing and cold water resources in Wisconsin.

I love to read straight through my books to learn everything I can, but I couldn't do it with this one. It is a very detailed reference book with everything you always wanted to know about forms, including every obscure thing you didn't care to know or that's no longer browser supported. It is incredibly dry to read, and the print is tiny. I had to keep jolting myself to stay with it, and could only read a bit at a time. There is absolutely nothing friendly about this book. It is a very detailed and complete reference book on forms, and that's its value. As a quick reference book, it succeeds. As a read-through, it fails.

A lot of useful and practical information, but the fonts are too small, and you will probably need a magnifier to read this book.

I've been trying to decide how to implement a data collection and information system based on a web interface for months. Since it's served in a Windows environment, the choices seemed endless...until I found this book. Probably the two most popular methods (before .NET *really* grabs hold) are presented side-by-side in a real-life application.

Before delving into the details of the two types, the authors review form contents/elements, give advice on form design, and cover briefly Flash forms for those users. The heart and soul is the comparison between Forms/ASP and PHP/MySQL. And, for completeness, the authors cover form validation (mostly client-side) and the basics of the future (as Microsoft sees it anyway), .NET framework.

The Pizza This order system (Forms/ASP) and online survey (PHP/MySQL) examples demonstrate how knowledgeable the authors are about "getting the job done...real time because its real work."

I highly recommend this book.

Aimed at intermediate to advanced developers, "Constructing Usable Web Menus" homes in on what works, and what doesn't when designing menus for the Web. Chock full of copious amounts of code and screenshots, the book offer a good, albeit incomplete, overview of available menu options for webmasters and guidelines for effective menu design.

The book is one of the first in a series of how-tos from Glasshaus, a new imprint from Wrox Press. This new series is designed to teach "web professional to web professional" and is slanted towards the more proficient practioners of the craft.

The first two chapters of the 227 page book offer guidelines for good menu design (rules, info architecture) while the final four chapters show how to create various types of menus through JavaScript, DHTML, Flash, and PHP/MySQL to populate client-side menus.

The first part of the book deals primarily with usability and information architecture. Here's a list of the "12 Rules for Web Menu Usability" from the first chapter:

1. Menus must be considerate of the user's main task
2. Menus must be distinct from content
3. Menus must be clearly readable
4. Menus must be easily scanned for information
5. Menus must be easily operated
6. Menus must behave as your target user would expect
7. Menus must load quickly as possible
8. Menus must be consistent across a site
9. Menus must put a higher premium on usability than branding
10. Menus must be localizable
11. Menus must be accessible to the handicapped
12. Menus must work on multiple browsers

All good advice. On the last point the authors do an admirable job, claiming their code works on most modern browsers, including IE4+, Netscape 4+, and Opera 5+ for the PC and IE4+, Netscape 6+, and Opera 5+ for the Mac. They make some good points, especially that menus be clearly readable and fast loading. I've seen many a site with slow loading, tiny text menus that are difficult to use, especially for users with older eyes or motor impairments. Designers would be well-advised to follow their guidelines.

However, the authors' coverage of menu designs is somewhat incomplete, and their research needs a refresh. They don't cover simple CSS menus that don't require JavaScript. Perhaps this was because they decided to include Netscape 4 among their target browsers. They also cite Miller's 1956 7+-2 paper, then say it is out of date, but offer no more recent data on the limits of short term memory and menu design (Microsoft's depth versus breadth research for example).

Expandable menus are covered, but hierarchical menus get just one screen shot, from MSDN. While some may question the use of slow-loading or overly complex menus on Web sites, hierarchical menus are in use on many popular sites...Overall the book gives developers a good overview of menus on the Web, and how to create them.

I was a Technical Reviewer on this book. You might feel that I would be biased in favour of the book, however, I have a good overview of the content of the book, ands just want to give you a fair idea of what it's about.

Usability is something that all of us as web developers have to deal with day in and day out. With the dawn of every new day in this industry, we are forced to realize thats it's becoming more of a people issue and less
of a technology issue. On any web resource, the menu ultimtely decides whether or not its going to be a killer application.

This book gives you everything you need to build great usable menus. What I liked about this book is that it's not tied down to any technology. It has something for everyone, and the chances are that you will end up using some
of the alternatives that it offers.

For example, it has 12 common sense usability rules to follow to make sure you're on the right track, a great Flash menus tutorial that shows how to populate a Flash menu from XML using PHP, tons of great JavaScript/DHTML menu examples, and advanced addons to these menus, involving dynamic population of HTML menus using PHP/ASP, from XML and SQL Server/MySQL - a dynamic approach to menus aking them more scalable, and easier maintained.

"Usable Web Menus" is one book which helps you build great menus right off the shelf. I wouldn't miss this book for anything. Do buy a copy for yourself, I assure you won't regret it.

We have enjoyed this book for over a year. The pages were still "smelly" except the peppermint lollypop page. My daughter really enjoyed seeing the children in costume, and smelling the different pages.
It has held up well, and we can recommend it to young ones who enjoy Halloween.

This is a coffee-table book for climber wannabe's who might want to pretend they're going to climb some of the great ridges of the Himalaya. Most of the photos are pretty good, but the maps are sloppily drawn, and the writing style is about as bone dry as you can get--it's hard to make routes on the overwhelming ridges and cols of the high Himalayas look and sound dull, but by God, the authors really managed to do it. Then again, the authors haven't had much success on these climbs themselves--[...]--clinical studies of passionate endeavors untainted by personal expertise. I am dumbfounded that a couple of reviewers claimed to love this book, but then again, some people also claim to love year-old fruit cake.

Yet another coffee-table book on climbing the Himalayas, this time with a purported "Alpine-Style" aesthetic binding it all together. Unfortunately, many of the photos tend to be a bit amaturish, the writing uninteresting, which is saying alot given the fascinating subject matter the authors had to deal with. The gung-ho climbing aesthetic is also questionable, given the authors' own backgrounds. Plenty of other excellent coffee-table books have been written about climbing the pristine parts of the high Himalaya, in terms of photo quality and relevance, this one doesn't really compete.

Unfortunately, recent reviewers have focused more on the achievments of the authors themselves than what has been written in the book.

It is a great book with loads of info on many different great routes done in the only proper style, i.e. alpine style. There are many references to the original articles, if you ever plan to have some expeditions to the area described in the book, as well as more general references to books of the first ascents of the mountains described and it that respect very resourceful.

Also, I think it is one of the virtues that the book is not written in an overpassionate, and boosting manner as most autobiographic books, but rather describes in a very admiring way the great achievments of extreme alpinism in the Himalaya.

If you want to know more about the greatest achievments in Alpine climbing in recent years this book does give you a great overview of some of the most facinating (and craziest) climbs.

I agree that some of the maps are not very good and that there could have been more depth in the description of the climbs, but the references should help someone wanting some more info.